Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60k vinyl turntable | Hacker News Reader

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60k vinyl turntable

theregister.com

26 pointsLinuxBender11 comments

The article says Ive's consultancy contributed the power/ speed control button and the hinges. It isn't as though they let him play with anything important.

How long till these components fail prematurely? Ive's "beautiful" designs have mostly been mechanical engineering nightmares - e.g. bendable iPhone 6, the cracking polycarbonate case on the Mac Cube.

Honestly, I don't miss physical media at all. Downloaded and streamed media is so much more convenient. Everything is neatly categorized and just a search away. In the case of streaming music, I now have nearly every song I could ask for.

This is nothing short of incredible compared to only listening to the CDs I could afford to buy or hoping that my favorite song would randomly play on the radio after the commercial break was over and the DJ finally shut up.

> Downloaded and streamed media is so much more convenient.

Until the day it disappears without warning, the metadata is mangled, or the song is replaced with a censored version, and yes all of these things I have experienced with absolutely zero customer support and zero fucks given by the streaming company.

There are episodes of TV shows (Always Sunny for example) which have been deleted/memory holed in the streaming version as they have been deemed politically incorrect and only available on physical media. Of course the streaming service will still charge you full price to purchase the season missing episodes.

I'll stick to ripping CDs thank you.

That is true. It is definitely a drawback of not “owning” your music, but simply subscribing to it. It’s just that for the price of what I’m paying for streaming I get a virtually unlimited music catalog for what I would be able to buy maybe 10 CDs a year tops, with about half of the songs being filler track garbage. The value I get out of a streaming music subscription is incredible.

The value I get from just stealing media is unbeatable.

I can use the money I save on subscriptions to see a show and buy merch, which means the bands I like actually get paid. Win-win.

I totally agree with this. As streaming migrates to > CD-quality bitrates, and Dolby Atmos and such emerge, the idea of using physical CDs seems silly. I can understand that it might be possible to have a completely analog chain from microphone/instrument to vinyl, and that is sort of tantalizing, but vinyl is really such a hack and has weak S/N ratio etc, I think it's silly to use it in this day and age. (Except to access rare recordings, which should be immediately digitized).

> Downloaded and streamed media is so much more convenient

Downloaded media can be convenient in some situations.

Streaming media is only "convenient" until you start watching it / listening to it. It is optimized for size.

That depends on your bandwidth and settings. Several music streaming services offer lossless music with spatial audio that is actually superior to what’s available on a CD and I can stream many movies in 4K UHD resolution that is likewise superior to DVDs and many Blu-Rays.

Jony Ive

pompous hack

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